Okay - First of all...

Yep - I'm new, but you've helped me more than you know. (I've probably used most of the foobar configs at one time or another.)

Now - I'm starting to get fed up with some of foobar2000's shortcomings (examples: RAM usage creeps up for me, cannot read embedded album art.) but I love a lot of foobar's features and I'm kind of looking for an alternative.

I'm looking for a player that doesn't skin, but takes my windows colors (this is EXTREMELY difficult to find for some stupid reason) and can read my embedded album art. I would like it to be light as well, but I can afford a few MBs of RAM I suppose. A good example of what I am (kind of) looking for is Sonata, a gtk mpd frontend (obviously for linux). A screenshot of Sonata can be found here.

I have seen XMplay, 1by1, Zinf, Xion and all the rest of the players that steal the winamp 'condensed' look or the iTunes look, and I really dislike them (not to mention that most of the itunes ones such as well....iTunes, wxMusik, and Songbird are quite memory hogs.) Can anyone help me?

A few questions: how much ram does foobar use? How many files do you have in your database? how many playlists do you have? Are you using the latest components?

I ask this because foobar uses about 70 mb of ram in my computer and that is after loading all my files in its database (some 25,000), with Panel UI and all that bells and whistles enabled.

I think you might be facing a memory leak through one of your components.

Well, Mine's not nearly at 70 MB, but I keep my music stripped down to what I really listen too.

I'm around 15 - 20 MB, but with about 2,500 songs that seems a bit heavy (even with my 1.5 GB of RAM)
All of my plugins are current as of about 2 to 3 weeks ago.

EDIT:
PanelsUI looks cool, I'd never heard of it before.

My Components are:
foo_winamp_spam
foo_dop
foo_uie_tabs
foo_uie_trackinfo_mod
foo_ui_colums
foo_ui_single_column_playlist

Have you tried disabling the media library? (you don't use the search or album list components, so i don't think it should affect you so much, but you should see some memory savings).

Well, I actually do use the Album List feature (albeit probably not like it was designed for)

I will disable to see how much of a savings I get.

However, my original question still stands - Does anyone know of a media player (besides foobar) that reads embedded album art and uses the windows color schemes?

for 2500 songs that sounds normal for when foobar is open. minimize it, see how much it takes then

You cannot spare 20 MB RAM of your 1,5 GB?

That's ridiculous. You will not find a player that consumes less memory than foobar at an equal feature level.

Bad luck for you.

I too thought that the memory usage decreased when minimized (in my case from about 70 mb to ~7 mb), but it turns out that the total memory used (physical + virtual) is the same regardless. You can verify this by enabling the Virtual Memory column in task manager.

If you take a look at your system tray you'll notice the year is 2007, not 1997. I know this discussion is about FB2K, but I'm running Winamp with loads of plugins, takes about 30mb total memory (physical+virtual) when it's minimized, I have only only 756MB of ram (1111MB total) and notice no slow down on my system. But if you're looking for something with low RAM usuage and that *might* take your windows colors, you should try http://www.rjamorim.com/rrw/dosamp.html . It was coded in '97

or you can take peters approach and code your own

No embedded album art but this is about as stripped down as you can get for an mp3 player.

http://www.sheepfriends.com/?page=billy

Mine takes up 20MB with 8000 songs in the library.

Which I think is really low, considering most other media players would be many times that without anything in the library at all.

Not to be disrespectful, but I think everyone here is focusing on one aspect of my question.

My main problem with foobar2000 right now is NOT its RAM usage (although I can get a media player up in a couple megs on my linux distribution, even with 2500 songs.) My main problem is that it cannot read my embedded album art and I'm getting rather tired of redoing its interface to my liking.

Billy is interesting, I like the fact that it can be controlled completely through the keyboard, but its lack of features somewhat throws me off (I prefer random playback etc.) Visually, though, it looks great. (I'm weird like that I guess)

Thank you for the suggestion.

VUPlayer and musikCube are a couple of good players that are light on the resources. As others have stated though, you'll have a hard time finding a player that has a lighter footprint than foobar2000.

xpromisex, I agree. The lack of album art is a bit of a sore spot for me as well. I'm actually finding myself increasingly annoyed by foobar2000. In the early days of development, the developers were responsive to requests. I've made several feature requests that should not be too difficult (like adding mass renamer modes that combine both renaming the files and moving the non-audio files, which really just needs to do one then the other). Other people have made similar requests.

Everything is closed, including the configuration files. Everything is becoming increasingly closed. What's more, as the development team doesn't seem to really have much time to put into foobar2000 any more, it's stagnating. The only viable alternative to stagnation of a closed product would be open-sourcing, but that's apparently too much to ask. Opening the source code would completely solve the stagnation issue, would probably cause a huge flood of positive improvements to the program, and would remove the necessity for the mammoth and daunting API.

Anyhow, I long for the early days when the developers actually cared what the users thought. Now users' opinions seem to be perceived as irrelevant at best. As there's nothing out there with the component base of foobar2000, I'm locked in to a community that used to be much better than it is today.

I don't think album art is a problem for fb2k, the album art plug-inis very configurable and I don't know any player wich allows you to set up your image sorting as well. The embedded album art, is not a problem in my thinking because emb. album art is just a totally waste of space and it has limitations.

When foobar2000's album art is as easy to use as iTunes', I'll be content with it. It could be much better than it currently is. My "ideal" solution is to have an entire album in a single file. Album art, tracks, cuesheet. All we need now is album art to be integrated, and we've got an all-in-one file-per-album solution, which would be awesome.

Hmm..
I definitely gave the wrong 'vibe' in my first post.

I'm not necessarily looking for a player that's lighter that foobar. My problem is that foobar's RAM usage increases as time goes on, but not to anything horrible. (Like I said - normally between 15 and 20, maxing out at about 25 MBs)

I guess I didn't realize what I was tired of with foobar.
I'm tired of hand theming it. I want something useful and light right out of the box. Foobar has the light part, but it's default UI is...well, crap. I linked Sonata's image in my first post, and that is pretty much the epitomy of how I use a player, I suppose. Looks like I might have to code that one myself if I want it in windows. (And it's too bad that Sonata is an MPD frontend meaning that I can't just recompile it on Windows and release a binary.)

If I have appeared too 'elitist', I apoligize. I understand that 15 - 20 MBs of RAM isn't a huge amount - I suppose I'm just spoiled by my ultralight linux install (I can boot the machine in just about 50 MB or so of RAM after the initial boot process).

MusikCube looks interesting. More so if I can remove the two top panes from the interface and leave one larger pane.
VuPlayer looks great though - There's little that I would change at all on this one.

Thanks for the suggestions, guys - I appreciate it.

EDIT: In response to $char(9836): You may be right about embedded album art, but I think that putting an image in a folder with the songs is a very 'hack' sort of solution. It also has it's own problems. I understand that embedding album art increases file size etc. but with as cheap as storage is these days I'd rather have it embedded and always usable than to have to resort to a less graceful solution.

foobar2000's album art plug-in is seriously not that hard, if you just know a tiny bit om th tagz syntax...

I had been using it for years when you joined.

Yes, then you should have no problem with it.

Work on the next version of foobar2000 is going on behind the scenes. Thank you for your concerns.


Even the different parts of the foobar2000 core use the API to communicate with each other; it's the key to the extensibility of foobar2000. Turning foobar2000 into a monolithic open-source software? I don't see that happening.


I think the crux is that the community has both grown and changed. I also find myself longing for the old days, when there used to be a higher rate of component developers among the user base. The current situation is that around 90% of the forum discussion is about the visual aspects of foobar2000 - or more precisely about the - IMO - rather user-unfriendly configuration of some third-party UI components.



The sad part is that you have to know some titleformat tricks to even get folder.jpg to display with the album art component.

IMO the whole of foobar is user unfriendly. Not only some third-party components (anyone remember the infamous TAGZ language?).

You sound a bit disppointed in your quote above. Visual aspects play a decisive role in any modern software, especially a media player. Foobar is no different, and we see this in current discussions in the forum.

If the core of foobar or the official component grid does not provide the functionality users want I find it more than natural that a plugin comes up and gets the momentum. Advanced visual configuration is what users wanted for a long time, and now they got it, thanks to terrestrial and his/her plugins (do you see the irony here? ).

Long gone are the days when foobar was a developer's playground. It is now a very popular media player. This is not bad per se, but some people seem not to accept this very well.

Yes but that is included in the default settings

What we see is that a certain kind of people is so desperate for that extra bit of eye-candy, that they'll put up with large, ugly titleformat scripts and the problems regarding those. Which is what most of the discussion is about.


Let's see: foobar2000 offers an SDK, so that third-party developers can provide functionality not contained in the official package. Specifically the SDK provides the ability to exchange the user interface, since it's extremely unlikely that there ever will be an official fully themable user interface. Now terrestrial makes a fully themable user interface. Sorry, I don't see the irony.

To say it clearly: I'm not disappointed or annoyed by the existence of these plugins, but by their quality. I'm not talking about the visual capabilities, I've seen screenshots of some really nice configurations. It's the configuration that drives me crazy. Just last week I tried to use a premade configuration. (I'm not good with graphics and I no longer have the patience to deal with titleformat scripts longer than roughly 200 characters, so creating a configuration myself was out of the question.) I didn't get it to work. I was just looking at a black window with two grey frames. There were no error messages and my frustration quickly outgrew my curiosity, so abandoned the experiment. I never figured out, if I had missed to grab one of the additional components or if I had placed some files in the wrong directory. I hope terrestrial doesn't lose interest before you can put an (archive) file with all the data and scripts for a theme inside to whatever place you like, point Panels UI to it and have it just work (at least if you got all the additional components).


Ah yes, the good old days when people had enough common sense to not use titleformat scripts to do the job of a scripting language, and instead used a real scripting language (see Lua in foo_looks).

I see a threadsplit coming ;-)

To be honest, i also find the current approach questionable. Yes, it is powerful and makes it *possible* to do various stuff which users wanted for a long time. Simultaneusly it makes it extremely complex and difficult and kills every chance for seperating dev-preferences from user-preferences in the UI.

It will not work.

Well, maybe it will, but in a very very ugly way. The more cool the layouts will become, the more unexperienced users will jump on the bandwaggon and cause massive support-overload, because these components are designed to be used by hackers, yet get a userbase consisting mostly of normal users. In short, the result is an UI which looks kewl but which most of its users cannot handle. I have written the most nightmarish types of code in my past and consider myself pretty much the opposite of a purist..... yet, i consider the current approach ugly - and even that may be an understatement.

Fixing the situation requires two solutions IMHO:

1. There will always be the ones who want every possible exotic feature and be able to do anything. I agree with foosion here, that such a demand should be the job of an UI, which uses a real scripting language.

2. A non-minimalistic yet simple to use UI for beginners and powerusers (non-experts). The entire "skinning/layouting" should be hardcoded into the UI. Make the UI based on columns, but hardcode the left side of the list, which would contain a hybridmode display of standard stuff (artist, album, track, title, length, albumart). By hardcoding this part of the UI, it can be layouted in a nice way, without confronting the user with complex scripting or titleformatting. For additional metadata, the user can then create additional columns with simply titleformatting (i.e. rating, bitrate, etc.). So, configuration of the playlist-display would only consist of specifying columns for secondary metadata, and setting the colors for the playlist. The UI would additionally support panels. There you have your UI which is easy to use, looks nice, and is sufficient for the majority of people.

I would definitely use something like this since I gave up on overly complicated setups some time ago, but I doubt the "visually-inclined" part of the user base would be interested. A few users have mastered the complex configuration settings of the latest UI plugins and are creating some over-the-top eye candy, and other (new/regular) users just want to dive right in and use these complex configs without ever even touching the default UI (thus causing a massive flood of n00b questions and/or requests.) The first group of users i think will quickly find the shortcomings (in their opinion) of this proposed UI and move on to more complicated third party stuff (just as they do now), the second group will also act just as they do now and discard this proposed UI in favor of more advanced configs that the first group creates/uses/shares.

So in this scenario, it wouldn't be any different from now.

foosion, I understand your point and agree with most of it. I am also annoyed by the current complexity to get a workable layout with panelsUI/columnsUI and the like.

The irony that I was referring to is that since foobar does not provide theming/skinning capabilities in its core all this functionality has to be available through a complex scripting language in a third party plugin. You cannot escape this no matter how much you dislike it. Users want advanced layout capabilities and apparently are willing to pay the price for it (complexity).

Do you really think you can make something similar to a panelsUI layout with foo_looks and LUA? I never seen it.

Can you comment on whats being considered for 1.0?

Well, I just think it could be a lot less complex than it is today.


With the actual component? No. But its approach is a lot more viable than using titleformat scripts for everything.

See foo_ui_gfx for another example of a UI component that uses Lua scripting; unfortunately it never progressed even as far as foo_looks regarding usability. One of the good ideas its author had was to present (script-generated) options visually (on the preferences page), users could change fonts and colors without modifying the script.


Given that the next version will not be 1.0, I couldn't even if I wanted to since I don't know.

IMHO titleformatting should get some changes as the amount of syntax for simple commands is really enormous.
Terrestial made a start AFAIK and implemented sth. like an interpreter (solver) for +-*/ instead of $add,$sub, etc.
The tons of brackets are more painful than anything, setting conditional statements brings less fun.
Wouldn't it make sense to have sth. like LUA-scripting as main-title-formatting-modul?

No, because TAGZ is for titleformatting while LUA is for scripting. People are abusing titleformatting for scripting. Thats the whole point of previous discussion: Titleformatting is not lacking scripting abilities - instead, UIs are lacking support for a real scripting-language.

LUA (e.g.) as main-scripting-modul, wherever sth. will be interpreted. titles then needs to be formatted per LUA string/pattern-commands. At least certain libraries, math, string,cond.statements,.. should be implemented.
Sure, abusing is done as there is obviously need.. lets wait for the next generation change :-)

I really dug foobar2000 for all the cool things you could do with it including the album art panel.

I still use it for trans-coding WavPack to mp3.

However once I had it all configured and looking pretty, I had to minimize it to do other things on the computer.

So in the end it was all about the music and not eye candy for me.

I can use foobar fairly easily but the wife and other family members can't/won't deal with any added complexities. All they want is an easy point and click player that works.

So we use Winamp now as the sonic quality is equal to foobar even playing back WavPack lossless ripped CD albums/files.

YMMV

I have to agree with just about everything being said here, and much of the added complexity is why I'm working on getting away from foobar.

I still haven't found something I like enough to SWITCH to.
The added complexity becomes overbearing, even for someone who knows TAGZ such as myself.

Speaking to the memory usage from earlier...

MediaCenter (Jriver, not MS) is using 15MB while minimized. My library is about 13,000 FLAC files.

Edit: Funny, I just maximized, then minimized. It's now using less than 7MB.

something like this by default would be nice

http://www.exaile.org/trac/screenshots/1/large

Thats kind of what Lyx proposed.

@foosion: Thanks for the response. By "development team", I meant more the development community, and I agree with you there's been a slowdown lately.

I simply don't know. There are many advantages that Open Source could bring to foobar2000. However, it may do little. Musepack has taken quite a while to get where it is now, and development seems almost glacial at times.

One way or another, I'm still eagerly anticipating 0.9.5. There's nothing yet like foobar2000.

That sums it up nicely. In the big audio player picture, there really is nothing like foobar, but by itself it's in an unhealthy state.

Well, I don't really care about which player is more configurable and scriptable, as long as it does what I want it to do, and that is to play music gaplesly, and to show me which artist it is, which album, what bitrate, and a album art.
The best ever software of that kind I found is Amarok on linux, too bad it doesn't work on windows - it has everything one would ever need of an media player with integrated library; I don't like media libraries with integrated players, I will handle my tags, covers, and folder structure myself, thank you. Itunes being the first one that pops into my mind - I struggled with it (and OSX) for a month when I had that new Intel Mac on testing.
Foobar is good, lightweight player - and it's own configuration is excellent. But, to be able to use it and to enjoy looking at it you have to add something more, in my case only three plugins - for something that basic, it's too much trouble, as I don't really want to spend a lot of time on this - I just want to turn on album art display, and load some skins, and that's it.
Windows apps I tried are trying too much to compete with iTunes and to look like they can even cook - and more than often they can't even do gapless playback.
I'd suggest you make configuration, and zip it - next time you will have already configured foobar. So far, foobar really offers only what you need, and not anything more

well my foobar is portable and my config is (for the lack of time) still from 0.6 or something.

Amarok would be good if it had real gapless playback, if it had replaygain, if it supported mass tagging and if it could convert between formats.

You say you have gapless playback? What engine/configuration? I never could get it to work gaplessly.

Ok, there's a 3rd party script for replaygain which is insanely slow and doesn't work really well, as it keeps messing with the volume slider -> no good way to control volume. Did I mention it is slow? There are quite a few request for this on their forums dating back at least 2 years and a solution was discussed years ago amongst the devs. No progress on the matter it seems, instead they just keep adding eyecandy and browser/context/lyrics/etc features.

There's also a script for converting files. It also seems slow as hell. A decent progress dialog would be nice and not just some popup that tells you nothing.

Tagging? Lacking. It is even a bigger problem because there isn't even that many standalone taggers available on linux in the first place. Besides, standalone taggers are inconvenient.

Some troubles for "new" users with no deep knowledge about TAGZ and what plugins are needed to have their foobar look like "on that screenshot" could be avoided with some kind of an installer for custom configs. It should have its own kind of packages that contain the necessary data (e.g. the .fcs-files for foo_ui_column) and a list of dependencies (which plugins are needed for the config). Although, for the whole concept to work, some kind of a centralized plugin database would be needed, to provide links to missing plugins or even install the missing ones automatically.

This way the "ugly" part of creating configs would have to be done once by its author, and at least for the end-user the visible level of complexity would decrease.

There was once an audio player called Sonique2 that had a powerful skinning engine called Mantis, with its own xml-based layout description and built-in scripting language good enough to write a complete media library as a "skin" (i.e. written in the scripting language instead of e.g. in C++ and compiled to a .dll). You'd put the file into the interfaces-folder, launch the skin and had a media library that had nothing to do with the core of the player, but still fully functional. Sadly, Sonique fell victim to big business and the fact that it didn't bring any profit to its owner, Lycos at that time.

Anyway, this kind of self-contained package distribution is something that foobar could also benefit from. The only problem back then has been that some skins used custom fonts that had to be installed by hand, everything else was reduced to copying a file into interfaces-folder

Woah, foobar is going linux...... its so complicated that one has to patch the symptoms by creating a package-manager!

Amarok is horrible in so many ways it could never replace foobar. I'm currently using mpd instead with the curses (text) frontend, and it's the fastest way ever of zipping through my collection.

Amarok is useful for seeing what new albums i've added recently, but it's too slow to be useful full time.

I'm currently working on a fullscreen opengl frontend for mpd that has *instant* metadata searching and a few other nice bits. Then I can have mythtv on one desktop, the mpd client on another and zip between them with a press of my remote control.

I don't really knew Sonique that much, but I really, really doubt that any scripting language is powerful enough to write a fast, scalable (>50,000 items) library engine in that would perform anywhere near foobar/WMP/iTunes/Winamp/JRiver/MediaMonkey. Building a fast library engine is not a trivial task.

Well, I rarely listen to various songs from various albums, I put album I want to listen, and it plays, so replaygain for me isn't all than necessary... my personal preference, I guess.



I HAD gapless playback with XINE engine. At least, it sounded that way it was Fedora core 5, and then 6.



Well, I don't think so - I'm used to TheGodfather + Foobar combination - I dislike foobar scripting (as I mentioned before, I think), and TGF does very good job on tagging.

Every man (or woman) has it's set of tools

H

Amarok is being ported to Windows soon anyway.